Future Blues

The cicada rasps an elegy to metal: the future was never supposed to be anything like this. Light spilled from every surface, not merely from the heart of some minor star. Robots made calluses obsolete. Space was a growth industry in an expanding universe.

Do you remember how we used to hold each other in our tinfoil suits, swaying to the hum & throb of rockets? There were no sagging porches in the rain, then, no clawhammer banjo or bumblebees wallowing through bergamot. Food grew in a grime-free solution, unsullied by the scandal of earth.

There were trees, yes – somehow we could never imagine a stage set without a green backdrop & props of wood. But the fate of the planet no longer hinged on whether any given ant could make it back to the nest, staggering under the weight of the corpse of a fly.

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Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave's writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the "share alike" provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).